Saturday, March 9, 2013

Peak Coal in Britain

This is a paper that I published in 2007 in the issue n. 73 of the ASPO newsletter. I thought it was appropriate to reproduce it here, because in a recent post I mentioned the question of Italian politics and coal imports from Britain before and during the second world war. It is a subject that I had already touched in this early study. So, here it is, on the whole still valid after some years.

Peak Oil's Ancestor: the Peak of British Coal Production in the 1920s

By Ugo Bardi
ASPO Newsletter n. 73Dec 10, 2006

Figure 1. British coal production from 1815 to 2004. The data from 1815 to 1860 are from Cook and Stevenson, 1996. The data from 1860 to 1946 are from Kirby 1977; the data from 1947 up to present are from the British Coal Authority (accessed 2006). The production data are fitted with a Gaussian function which approximates the Hubbert curve.

We are just a few years away from Peak Oil; the moment when the worldwide oil production will start an irreversible decline. What should we expect to happen at the peak and afterwards? History is not a direct guide, since there are no past cases of an important global commodity, such as oil, peaking.

However, there have been regional peaks which had global effects. The best known case is that of the US oil production that peaked in 1970 which brought the first great oil crisis in the years that followed. But that was not the first case of a major resource peaking and declining; there was another major peak almost half a century before: Peak Coal in Great Britain, in the 1920s.

The geological past left to Great Britain an endowment in coal unparalleled in any other region of Europe. Exploitation started in the Middle Ages and, already in early 18th Century had become an exponentially growing industry. Coal fuelled the British industrial revolution, and was also connected to political power, allowing Britain to construct the first, and so far the only, truly world empire in history.

The importance of coal is hard to over-estimate. During the period of expansion of the industry, a British miner could produce almost 250 tons of coal per year (Kirby 1977). Even taking into account that about 20% had to be used for mining more coal, the productivity of a coal miner, in energy terms, was hundreds of times larger than that of an agricultural worker. At the height of its empire, Britain employed more than one million miners (Kirby 1977). It was the superpower of the time, being challenged only by other coal-producing States. In the First World War, British coal fought against German coal: British coal won.

But coal couldn’t last forever, even for the richly endowed Britain. Already in mid 19th Century, William Stanley Jevons had predicted, in his The Coal Question (1856), that depletion would one day make British coal too expensive for British industry. Jevons did n’t state explicitly the concept of Peak Coal but, in a qualitative sense, his analysis was similar to that of Marion King Hubbert for the oil production in the United States (Hubbert, 1956). And Jevons had been right: the peak of British coal production occurred in 1913 with 287 M tons. The British coal industry struggled to maintain production but couldn’t reach that level again. The strain on the industry is also shown by the two miners’ general strikes of 1921and 1926 that caused a temporary fall of production. The downward trend became evident in the 1930s and could not be stopped.

The British production followed a classic bell-shaped curve in good agreement with Hubbert’s model, with a best fit of the distribution giving a peak in 1923, only ten years after the actual maximum. Today, coal production in Britain is less than one tenth than it was at its peak.

The peak of the British coal production was a turning point in history; never before had a major energy producing region started its decline. There are impressive analogies for the case of the British Coal Peak of 1923 and that
of the American Oil Peak of 1970. In both cases, these countries were producing at peak about 20% of the world total. In both cases, the worldwide consequences were important. Before the peak, Britain was exporting about 25% of its domestic production, and this amount had been growing exponentially together
with production. After the peak, exports started to decline causing a shortage of the coal in the world market. In the case of the US, oil exports were not important before the peak. But, after the peak, the US oil imports soared rapidly, leading also to a shortage in the world market.

The oil shortages in the 1970s gave rise to the price spikes causing the Great Oil Crisis. A similar spike took place in the 1920s for coal (Australian Gov., 2006) although it was less pronounced. Most likely, the coal spike was less abrupt because the price controls that had been put in place during the war were only
slowly relaxed in the 1920s. Coal prices stayed high in the 1920s, but fell with the market crash of 1929.

Many regions of Europe depended on British coal, so the lack of coal was felt everywhere. Several events that followed the British coal peak may be related to the reduction of the availability of energy: the decline of the British Empire, the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as the general political upheaval of Europe in the 1920s and 1930s. The Italian newspapers of the 1920s and 1930s are full of insults against Great Britain for not sending to Italy the coal that Italians felt entitled to have. It reflects the kind of attitude that western countries adopted against the Middle East oil producers in the 1970s. But, if British coal was dwindling in the 1930s, German coal was still on the increase; its peak would only arrive in the 1940s. Germany never produced as much hard coal, namely the best quality, as did Britain, but in the 1930s it had the advantage that it could still increase its production, whereas Britain’s was declining.

In the 1930s, Italy abandoned her traditional ally, Britain, for Germany because only Germany could provide the coal that the Italian industry needed at a price that Italians could afford. Only later on, would they realize that the price of German coal was to be much higher than it had seemed. In the 1950s, after the turmoil of the Second World War, the problems caused by the British coal peak were solved ― for a while ― by switching to oil. Likewise, after the turmoil of the oil crisis of the 1970s, the problems caused by the US oil peak were solved ― for a while ― by switching to other productive regions. In both cases, neither the public, nor the politicians, nor the economists saw the relationships between the political and economic events of the time which were related to the peaking of oil and coal production.

In the 1930s, whole books were written on coal (Neuman 1934) but the word depletion was hardly mentioned. In 1977, Kirby wrote more than 200 pages on the history of the British coal industry during the peak period without ever mentioning the question of depletion. Apparently, people could not grasp why, while there was still coal to be extracted, production would decline. They didn’t understand that it is not physical availability that counts, but the cost of extraction that increases with progressive depletion. It was a concept that Jevons had already understood almost a century before but had not survived in mainstream economics. The case of the US oil peak was similar; peaking was generally ignored by economists, even though Marion King Hubbert had predicted it correctly. All that happened afterwards was attributed to political causes. Both peaks were soon forgotten.

Today, it is global oil production which is peaking. It is something we are all seeing, but it is not politically correct to mention the fact. Peaking is a momentous event, but it hints at a reality that most people would rather ignore: the finiteness of mineral resources. We may well ignore the global peak, too, just as most people ignored the British coal peak of the 1920s and the US oil peak of 1970. Yet, we won’t be able to ignore its effects.

Hello! This is Ugo Bardi - I tend to overextend myself on the Web by writing a lot of stuff. Presently, my blog in English is titled "Cassandra's Legacy". In English, I have another blog a little more esoteric, titled Chimeras. The first is dedicated to sustainability, the second to mythology, history, and art. See also my latest book, "The Seneca Effect," Springer 2017.

as a warwickshire resident, i think its a absolute travesty all that wonderful coal is going to remain underground, wasted, when it could be burnt quickly to create more british jobs and more growth in the uk economy. we could run many more power stations with that coal, like in china. what about the economy. and the jobs situation. and did i mention the economy. does nobody ever think about these things. i don't know if i'm just being paranoid or something but its almost like there is a complete media blackout, or a taboo on the economy and jobs. the uk media always takes such a serious long term view of things (forever expounding on the inevitably fatal systemic environmental consequences of unrestricted, exponentially expanding economic activity, and colossal population overshoot on a delicate, finite planet), that it tends to ignore or forget the seemingly trivial, inconsequential and banal short term aspects to life. well at least there is talk of opening up the mine again in the future, so at least there is some hope.

Nothwithstanding the “three peaks” (now all three well documented) namely those of 1) coal; 2) oil and gas; and 3) uranium, most probably these three sources of energy will continue to be those most utilized by humans until the bitter end when they are fully exhausted and the earth (meaning the biosphere and the human society embedded in it) will be completely destroyed. Solar energy which has no peak will definitely have to wait until the biosfere is first fully destroyed. The reason? Seven billion chimapanzee and orangutan brains with only a fraction of a gene of difference. And with human society’s “leaderships and elites” (national and corporate) (and political, economic, and cultural) the most imbecilic, greedy and selfish of the lot.

I thought Anon was trying to be sarcastic. ;-)But from BBC:"The Conservative MP said: "There is still a vast amount of coal down there and there is always the possibility that it could be mined again in the future.","Well, that could be a bit over a year of UK imported coal to use in power stations. Quote "Total coal imports in quarter 3 2012 were 10.9 million tonnes, 33.4 per cent higher than in the same period in 2011 as a result of greater demand by electricity generators. The increase was largely due to a 50.2 per cent increase in steam coal imports, mainly from Russia, Colombia and the USA. Steam coal imports originating from the USA were more than double the volumes reported in quarter 3 2011 (1.1 million tonnes)."(google uk coal imports 2012 and see gov excel )

Ugo Bardi's blog

This blog deals with the future of humankind in view of such things as the overexploitation of natural resourecs and the effects of global warming. It is a bit catastrophistic, I know, but, after all, the ancient prophetess, Cassandra (above in a painting by Evelyn de Morgan) turned out to have been right!

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Listen! for no more the presage of my soul, Bride-like, shall peer from its secluding veil; But as the morning wind blows clear the east,More bright shall blow the wind of prophecy,And I will speak, but in dark speech no more.(Aeschylus, Agamemnon)

The Seneca Effect

The Seneca Effect: is this what our future looks like?

Chimeras: another blog by UB

Another blog by Ugo Bardi; it is dedicated to art, myths, literature, and history with a special attention to ancient monsters and deities.

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I try to publish at least a post every week, typically on Mondays, but additional posts often appear on different days. Comments are moderated: no insults, no hate, no trolls. You may reproduce my posts as you like, citing the source is appreciated!

About the author

Ugo Bardi teaches physical chemistry at the University of Florence, in Italy. He is interested in resource depletion, system dynamics modeling, climate science and renewable energy. Contact: ugo.bardi(whirlything)unifi.it